Incremental Evolution

This is a thing. To be precise, it is a thing.

In my experience of dealing with blogs, I have found that they typically fall into two categories. The first category is Informational Blogging, which is to say, the sort of blog where a person talks about how to do things. Usually these blogs are quite focused and their content only covers a rather narrow range of topics, which in and of itself is not a bad thing. While the purpose of this sort of blog is to inform, it’s not in the Wikipedia sense of the word. Rather than providing swaths of general information (not to say that Wikipedia doesn’t have massive amounts of confusingly technical information as well), the typical blog post on this sort of blog is one specific solution to one specific problem the author encountered and decided to document. It’s the kind of thing you find when you’re madly googling the topic trying to figure out why something isn’t working.

The second category is closely related to the first, and it is Anecdotal Blogging. These blogs are simply people telling stories. The stories are often of their own experiences, though not necessarily. For example, I would say a blog about someone’s travels around the world and a blog of political commentary both fall into this category.

These two categories are quite obviously not mutually exclusive. Oftentimes an informational blog distributes its information through anecdotes (after all, it’s pretty difficult for people to speak competently on subjects in which they have no experience), and likewise, the author of an anecdotal blog can share the lessons he or she learned as a result of his or her unique experiences. Also, I am not considering pure news blogs or the silly “reblogging” trend where people click a button to post the next silly cat picture or viral video or absolutely hilarious animated gif or et cetera on their tumblr. These are not generating new content, and neither a picture nor a video constitute a blog post (vlogs even have their own name!)

So what does that have to do with this… thing? Well, to be perfectly frank, not much. It’s a thought that formulated in my mind when I was contemplating whether or not I should create this. That, and it’s probably a good example of the sort of soppy and probably erroneous logic that will likely be prevalent in everything I write here.

To get back on topic (or, more accurately, switch to a different topic entirely), I came to the conclusion that a blog based on git (or any version control system, really) offers unique opportunities that aren’t present in your typical wordpress blogging platform. One of the things I like a lot about git is that it allows you to see exactly how something has matured and developed over time. It provides discrete snapshots of the various stages of development, and this is what inspired Incremental Evolution. I plan to treat this as a codebase (or blogbase, if you will) that will have its pieces updated and evolve as a body over time.

Well, we’ll see how that goes.